The EU relies increasingly on transnational networks bringing together national regulatory agencies (NRAs) to coordinate and discipline one another’s implementation of broad EU regulatory frameworks more softly than the hard law and centralised institutions of the Community Method. They may also advise EU institutions in their regulatory tasks and are sometimes coordinated through European agencies, but essentially their architecture is that of a transnational network and some form of softer disciplining. These networks decouple NRAs from their parent ministries, without re-coupling them into the supranational level (and a new set of political principals). They thereby float in a transnational space between the levels, using their cross-border reach, extensive internal consensus, ability to frame complexity and informational advantages to influence not only the daily business of overseeing national implementation and/or advising EU institutions but also their own formalisation/reform as networks.
The received understanding of the emergence and evolution of these transnational networks assumes regulatory complexity and interdependence create functional pressures for inter-state coordination that are then checked by the sovereignty reflex of governments reluctant to cede power to supranational institutions but prepared to tolerate the soft disciplining of a network that enables coordination without necessitating full-blown integration. We argue instead that these networks are (trans)formed also endogenously by the epistemic communities (i.e. NRA officials) that populate them and that do their soft disciplining. Moreover, these epistemic communities draw on their own internal governance practices (experimentation, peer-review, mutual learning and consensus building) to push a networked architecture, thus remaking the EU in their own image. We test this theory in a case study of recent negotiations over reform to the architecture for overseeing implementation of the EU’s regulatory framework for telecoms, drawing on interviews with principal participants. This provides compelling evidence of its plausibility that we extend here to other sectors.
